(An interlude of history that didn’t happen, brought to you tonight curtesy of Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights, © 2015)
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Background: Goya’s Etching #43 “The Sleep Of Reason Brings Forth Monsters”
We tell this story still as it has come down to us through many retellings, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, both the story of the poisoned box and the stories it contained, in which the poison was concealed. This is what stories are, experience retold by many tongues to which, sometimes, we give a single name, Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa, Scheherazade. We, for our own part, simply call ourselves ‘we’. ‘We’ are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is. As they pass down to us the stories lift themselves away from time and place, losing the specificity of their beginnings, but gaining the purity of essences, of being simply themselves. And by extension, or by the same token, as we like to say, though we do not know what the token is or was, these stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
…Of being the chosen people God smashes with his fist to make an example of, whenever he wants to make a point…
The narrow mind replaces the wide skirt. Majority rules, and minority, look out.
When he was a college student in Florence…he encountered the extraordinarily un-American idea that reality was not something given, not an absolute, but something that men made up, and that values, too, changed according to who was doing the valuing. A world that did not cohere, in which truth did not exist and was replaced by warring versions trying to dominate or even eradicate their rivals, horrified him and, being bad for business, struck him as a thing that needed altering. He named his home La Incoerenza, incoherence in Italian, to remind him daily of what he learned in Italy, and spent a sizable proportion of his wealth promoting those politicians who held, usually because of genuine or fake religious convictions, that the eternal certainties needing protecting and that monopolies, of goods, information and ideas, were not only beneficial but essential to the preservation of American liberty.
Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being…a child understands nothing and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be see as mankind’s long adolescence and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist, but that like any proud parent, he awaits the day when his child can stand on his own two feet and make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.
She began to love her beloved in her, and she in him, but beyond that she started loving the human race for its ability to love, and then, for its other emotions too. She loved men and women because they could fear and rage and cower and exult.
Now the world itself is shapeshifting.
It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival; their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented, in the eye.
The strangenesses are multiplying…though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it is difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary, strangenesses, or the new, extraordinary, variety. Super storms have devastated Fiji, and Malaysia, and as I write giant fires are spreading across Australia and California. Perhaps this extreme weather is just the new normal, giving rise to the usual arguments between proponents and opponents of climate change. But perhaps this is evidence of something much worse. Our group takes what I’ll call a “post-atheist” stance. Our position is that God is a creation of human beings who only exists because of a “clap hands if you believe in fairies” principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands then this Tinker Bell God would die. However, unfortunately billions of people are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of God-Fairy, and as a result, God exists. What’s worse, is that he is now running amok…That’s exactly right; the triumph of the destructive irrational manifests itself in the form of an irrationally destructive god.
Suppose…that one day God sent a storm, such a storm as could shake loose the moorings of the world; a storm which told us to take nothing for granted, not our power, not our civilization, not our laws, because if nature could rewrite its laws, break its bounds, change its nature, then our constructs, so puny in comparison, stood no chance, and this is the great test we face, our world, its ideas, its culture, its knowledge and laws is under attack by the illusion we collectively created, the supernatural monster we ourselves unleashed. Plagues will be sent, like those we sent to Egypt, but this time there will be no request to “Let my people go.” This God is a not a liberator, but a destroyer. He has no commandments. He’s over all that. He’s sick of us, the way he was in Noah’s time. He wants to make an example, he wants to do us in.
In certain quarters, the quest for scapegoats had begun. It was important to know, whose fault all this was. It was important to know, if things were going to get worse. Maybe there were identifying persons, destabilizing persons, who were somehow responsible for the destabilized world. Maybe these were persons carrying within them some sort of genetic mutation that gave them the power to induce paranormal happenings. People who posed a threat to the rest of the normal human race…maybe the disease — the strangeness was a social disease now it seemed — had been brought to America by some of these persons…Many taxi drivers put up stickers in their cabs reading, I’m Not That Strange, or Normalness, not Strangeness, Is the American Way. There were a few worrying reports of physical attacks, but another scapegoat group was identified, and the laser beam of public attention swung away from brown-skinned folks.
What was happening to him was impossible, but it was happening, so it was possible. The meanings of the words, possible, impossible, were changing. Could science explain it to him, could religion? The idea that there might be no explanation and no cure was a notion he was not willing to entertain.
What use did he have for doctors? Could a pill cure his condition? No, it could not.
America medical care invariably failed those who needed it most. He wanted nothing to do with it.
It was hard not to ask, Why me? But he had begun to grasp the difficult truth that a thing could have a cause, but that was not the same as having a purpose.
Even if you work out How a certain thing had come about, even if you answered the How question, you would be no closer to solving the Why. Anomalies of nature, like diseases, did now respond to inquiries about their motivation.
Could anything be done, or was he beyond the reach of medicine and science? Had real life simply become irrelevant? Had he been captured by the surreal and would he soon be devoured by it? Was there any way of thinking about his plight that made any ordinary kind of sense? And was he in fact infectious or contagious or capable in some other way of transmitting his condition to others? How long did he have? Was he the guinea pig for what would eventually be the earth’s rejection of the entire human race?
Instill fear… only fear will move sinful man towards God. Fear is a part of God in the sense that it is the feeble creature man’s appropriate response to the infinite power and punitive nature of the Almighty. One might say that fear is the echo of God and wherever that echo is heard men fall to their knees and cry mercy.
In some part of the Earth, God is already feared. Don’t bother about those regions. Go where man’s pride is swollen. Where man believes himself to be God-like. Lay waste his arsenals and flesh pots, his temples of technology, knowledge, and wealth. Go also to those sentimental locations where it is said God is Love. Go and show them truth.
His familiar nostrums…sounded hollow and impotent. The president had no weapons that could deal with this attacker; he had become a president of empty words, as many of them are…but we had expected better of him.
Emergency supplies were running out. Bug Out bags, also known as GOODbags or INCHbags, acronyms for Get Out Of Dodge bags and I’m Never Coming Home bags, became de rigueur that season. There was much argument about what your go-bag needed. Did it, for example, need a gun, to repel crackheads who didn’t have go-bags? The exits to the city were jammed with honking cars full of INCHbag bearing adults and children heading for the hills. Lane closures were ignored, and this led to accidents and even longer traffic jams. Panic was the order of the day.
Fear changed the fearful…fear was a man running from his shadow. It was a woman wearing headphones and the only sound she could hear in them was her own terror. Fear was a solipsist, a narcissist, blind to everything but itself. Fear was stronger than ethics, stronger than judgement, stronger than responsibility, stronger than civilization. Fear was a bolting animal trampling children underfoot as it fled from itself. Fear was a bigot, a tyrant, a coward, a red mist, a whore. Fear was a bullet pointed at his heart.
There is indeed a plague spreading, he thundered, and if we do not defend ourselves against it, we will all be infected for sure. It’s infecting us already, the impurity of a disease has touched the blood of many of our weaker children. But we are ready to defend ourselves, we will fight the plague at its roots. The plague had many roots.
You are the spreader of the plague…Patient Zero! Typhoid Mary! Your body should be wrapped in plastic and buried a mile underground so that you can’t ruin any more lives.
Go away, he said. This is my home, this is my castle. I’ll defend myself with cannons and boiling oil.
Is that a threat of violence, Sir?
Human beings did not know how to handle the irruption of the supranormal into their lives…most of them simply fell apart or had their haircuts and wept with love for the baby-faced tyrant…or prostrated themselves before false gods, who wanted them to murder the devotees of other false gods, and that too was being done, statues of These gods destroyed by followers of Those gods, lovers of Those gods castrated stoned to death hanged sliced in half by the lovers of These. Human sanity was a poor, fragile thing at best…Hatred stupidity devotion greed the four horseman of the new apocalypse. Yet she loved these wrecked people and wanted to save them…
To love one human being was to begin to love them all.
To love two was to be hooked forever, helpless in the grip of love.
Come with me, she said. I will reveal myself to you when you are ready to see me.
Then,
just as the inhabitants of the city were discovering the true meaning of being without shelter, even though they had always believed themselves to be experts in shelterlessness, because the city they hated and loved had always been bad at providing its inhabitants with protection against the storms of life, and had inculcated in its citizens a certain fierce loving-hating pride at their own habits of survival in spite of everything, in spite of the not-enough-money issue and the not-enough-space issue and the dog-eat-dog issue and so on;
just as they were being forced to face the fact that the city or some force within the city or some force arriving in the city from outside the city might be about to expel them from its territory forever, not horizontally but vertically, into the sky, into the freezing air and the murderous airlessness above the air;
just as they began to imagine their lifeless bodies floating out beyond the solar system, so that whatever alien intelligences might be out there would meet dead human beings long before living ones and wonder what stupidity or horror had pushed these entities out into space without so much as protective clothing;
just as the screams and weeping of the citizens began to rise above the noise of such traffic as continued to ply the streets…and those individuals who believed in such things began to shout in the frightened streets that the Rapture had begun, as foretold in Paul’s first epistle to the Thessalonians, when the living and the dead would be caught up in the clouds and meet the Lord in the air, it was the end of days, they cried…(and) it was getting to be hard even for the most diehard skeptic to disagree;
just as all this was going on…;
just at that precise moment a great light flooded outwards and upwards…and the revelation opened the royal gate…;
His heart filled with something that might have been happiness, but poured out of his eyes as grief. The tears were uncontrollable and his whole body shook with the sadness of what was, there are tears in things, said pious Aeneas in Virgil’s words long ago, and mortal things touch the mind.
The idea that language was an infection from which the human race needed to recover, that speech was the source of all dissension, wrong-doing and character decay, that it was not, as many had often declared, the bedrock of liberty but rather the seedbed of violence, spread rapidly…and soon children were being dissuaded from singing playground songs and old-timers discouraged from reminiscing about antique exploits while sitting on their accustomed benches under the tree in the main square.
You may think it’s a choice, she said, but soon you won’t be able to talk, even if you want to, while we Talkers actually can choose to converse, or to keep our mouths shut…At first people were angry…but then they discovered she was right, they couldn’t make any sort of sound even if they wanted to, even if they wanted to warn a loved one to avoid an oncoming truck.
The question is…What does this machine of the future produce?
That is obvious..It produces the future.
The future is not a product…Rather, it is a mystery. What does the machine actually make?
What does it make?…It makes glory! Glory is the product. Glory, honor and pride. Glory is the future. But you have shown that there is no place in that future for you. Take this terrorist away. I will not allow him to infect this sector with his diseased mind. Such a mind is a bearer of the plague.
It is I, she cried, who has spent long ages laboring on the construction of a machine that has no purpose, or a purpose so far-fetched, like glory, that the attempt to achieve it is self-defeating, and the machine is my life.
What is the poison in his body? Maybe it is himself.
Meaning was the frame humans beings placed around the chaos of being to give it shape…And here he was in a world no frame could contain…clinging to a supernatural stranger who had for a time posed as his departed wife, holding to her as desperately as she now held to him, drawn to him because he looked like a long-dead philosopher, each hoping that an alien surrogate could, by embracing them, allow them to believe that the world was good. This world, or that world, or simply the world in which two living things held one other and said the magic words…I love you.
And by this time the Chinese box was peeling crazily, and as each layer fell away a new voice told a new tale, none of the tales finished because the box inevitably found a new story inside each unfinished one, until it seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning in such an environment, only absurdity, the unmeaningness that was the only sort of meaning anyone could hold on to.
This is the question we ask ourselves as we explore and narrate our history: how did we get here from there?
…looking back at him, seeing him as if from a great distance, held there in a motionless tableau…lost in fantasy…
Their true love story, the one that has meaning for us and weight, comes wrapped up in a war. For our future places too, in that past time, had been made strange, and we know, we who come after and reflect, that we could not be who we are or lead the lives we live had these two not been called back to earth to make things right, or as right as things can ever be, if indeed our time is right, as we say it is, if it be not simply a different kind of wrong.
Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit to unavailable sex.
They huddled in a small room behind the sports bar, a poorly lit room situated in a small street off the main drag, where tourists formally did what tourists like to do, eating tourist food and driving tourist bumper cars, and posing for tourist pictures with a picture of Dolly Parton, and mining in a tourist’s mine for tourist gold.
Much changes in eighteen months on earth, in the age of acceleration that began around the turn of the millennium and still continues to this day. All our stories are told more quickly now, we are addicted to the acceleration, we have forgotten the pleasures of the old slownesses, of the dawdles, the browses, the three-volume novels, the four-hour motion pictures, the thirteen-episode drama series, the pleasures of duration, of lingering. Do what you have to do, tell your story, live your life, get out quickly, spit spot.
Marital law had been declared and the emergency services had done an astonishing job…Religious gangs had been roaming the city, looking for people to blame…A crowd of the faithful, for whom hostility seemed to be the necessary sidekick of fidelity…
The war had just become personal. The phrase to the death formed in his thoughts and he realized, with some surprise, that he meant it.
He was only slowly grasping what his life had become. That he had risen, he well knew. He had faced that and accepted it. The descent had been involuntary, as unexpected as the rising, and it was, he understood, the consequence of an opening within himself of a secret self whose existence he had not previously suspected. But perhaps there was also a human dimension to his descending, his overcoming of what he had often thought of as a fault, his fault. In those lonely pendant hours he had faced the darkest things in his life, the pain of separation from what that life had once been, the agony of the rejected path, the path that rejected him. By embracing his grave wound, showing it to himself, he became stronger than his affliction. He had earned his gravity, and came down to earth. Thus Patient Zero became a source not only of the disease but of the cure.
He felt as if he had entered another skin. Or as if he, who was another, had become the new occupant of his body, which was other to him. Age had slipped from his thoughts and a great field of possibility stood before his inner eye, filled with white flowers, each one the enabler of a miracle. The white asphodel was the flower of the afterlife but he had never felt more alive. It also occurred to him that the curse of rising had this in common with his present condition; that is local effects transcended the laws of nature.
This God, Just-Is…he doesn’t like being argued with, right?
He is essential, that is to say, pure essence, and as such, he is also inarguable…The second proposition unavoidably follows the first. To deny his essence would be to call him inessential, which would be to argue with him, who is, by definition, inarguable. Thus, to argue with his inarguability is self-evidently to misuse language, and, as I told you, you have to be careful what words you use and how you use them. Bad language can blow up in your face…Like explosives.
I have the feeling…that these wretched mortals of the lower world are even more confused about language than I was.
Teach them…Teach them the tongue of the divine Just-Is. The instruction should be intensive, severe, even, one could say, fearsome. Remember what I told you about fear. Fear is man’s fate. Man is born afraid, of the dark, of the unknown, of strangers, of failure, and of women. Fear leads him towards faith, not as a cure for fear, but as an acceptance that the fear of God is the natural and proper condition of man’s lot. Teach them to fear the improper use of words. There is no crime the Almighty finds more unforgivable.
What has taken my place in your affections, he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. A pile of dust knows its limitations.
She told him about the war. The enemy is strong, she said.
The enemy is stupid he said. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will define them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate.
Looking back, we tell ourselves this: the craziness unleashed upon our ancestors…was the craziness that also waited inside every human heart. We can blame…but if we are honest we must blame human failings.
The rebirth of the idea of pleasure was itself like the arrival of a new season, even though everyone knew that as long as the malevolent…were out there…— the danger remained.
In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate.
Yet we have to say it, they were our heroes, for by winning the War of the Worlds they set in motion the process by which our new and, we believe, better time came into being. That was the hinge moment, when the door from the past, where lay what we used to be, swung shut once and for all, and the door to the present, leading to what we have become, opened like the stone gateway to a treasure cave, perhaps even Sesame itself.
That is the new world in which we now live…. A plea for a world ruled by reason, tolerance, magnanimity, knowledge, and restraint… a peaceful, and civilized world, of hard work and respect for the land…
Fear did not, finally, drive people into the arms of God. Instead, fear was overcome, and with its defeat men and women were able to set God aside, as boys and girls put down their childhood toys, or as young men and women leave their childhood homes’ to make new homes for themselves, elsewhere, in the sun.
A gardener’s world, in which we must all cultivate our garden, understanding that to do so is not a defeat, as it was for Voltaire’s poor Candide, but the victory of our better natures over the darkness within.
We take pride in saying that we have become reasonable people. We are aware that conflict was for a longtime the defining narrative of our species, but we have shown that the narrative can be changed. The differences between us, of race, place, tongue and custom, these differences no longer divide us. They interest and engage us. We are one. And for he most part we are content with what we have become. We might even say happy. Flow on, rivers, as we flow on between you, mingle, currents of water, as we mingle with human currents from elsewhere and from near at hand! We stand by your waters amid the seagulls and the crows, and are glad.
Men and women of our city, your costumes please us, close-fitting, colourless, fine; great city, your foods, your odours, your speedy sensuality, casual encounters begun, fiercely consummated, discontinued, we accept you all; and meanings jostling in the street, rubbing shoulders with other meanings, the friction birthing new meanings unmeant by the meaners who parented them.; and factories, schools, places of entertainment and ill repute, our metropolis, thrive, thrive! You are our joy and we are yours and so we go together, between the rivers, towards an end beyond which there is no beginning, and beyond that, none, and the dawn city glistening in the sun.
But something befell us when the worlds were sealed off from each other. As the days lengthened into weeks, months, years, as the decades passed, and the centuries, something that once happened to us all every night, every one of us, every member of the greater ‘we’ which we have all become, stopped happening.
We no longer dreamt.
Now in sleep there was only darkness. The mind fell dark, so that the great theatre of the night might begin its unforeseeable performances, but nothing came. Fewer and fewer of us, in each successive generation, retained the ability to dream, until now we find ourselves in a time when dreams are things we would dream of, if we could only dream.
We read of you in ancient books, O dreams, but the dream factories are closed. This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, understanding, wisdom, goodness and truth: that the wildness in us, which sleep previously unleashed, has been tamed, and the darkness in us, which drove the theatre of the night, is soothed.
We are happy. We find joy in all things. Motor cars, electronics, dances, mountains, all of you bring us great joy. We walk hand in hand towards the reservoir and the birds make circles in the sky above us and all of it, the birds, the reservoirs, the walking, the hand held by the hand, all brings us joy.
But the nights pass dumbly. One thousand and one nights may pass, but they pass in silence, like an army of ghosts, their footfalls noiseless, marching invisibly through the darkness, unheard, unseen, as we live and grow older and die.
Mostly we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares.
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